Physicists at Trinity College recently began to monitor the experiment again. Last April they set up a webcam so that anyone could watch and try to be the first person ever to witness the drop fall live.

Mainstone, who has spent most of his life waiting to see a drop fall with his own eyes, congratulated the Trinity College team. “I have been examining the video over and over again,” he says, ”and there were a number of things about it that were really quite tantalizing for a very long time pitch-drop observer like myself.”

Wasn't there some kind of ancient torture where the victim was subjected to having pitch eventually drip onto the bridge of his nose? The first drop was never all that bad. It was the waiting for second drop that usually got to the victim. I heard the survivors were never quite the same again.

Do you not see the world within the world: what caused it to drop? No, not gravity, not viscosity, not time, and not that lil' bit of shaking they do when you're not watchin'. No, I mean the catastrophe that is the drip. That is the significance of the drip and its reach is unbounded.

This is even worse than running 10,000 hour creep tests where for the low temperature and low load conditions you set up the machine, come back 14 months (i.e. 10,000 hours) later to see what happened, and the only "data" you recorded was when the lab cleaner accidentally thumped the test machine with a floor polisher once every 3 months.

We once had an enthusiastic "financial engineering" project manager who proposed using 10 test machines at once to do a 10,000 hour test in 1,000 hours. We told him if he could figure out a way to make a baby in 1 month using 9 women, we would try the same idea...

This is even worse than running 10,000 hour creep tests where for the low temperature and low load conditions you set up the machine, come back 14 months (i.e. 10,000 hours) later to see what happened, and the only "data" you recorded was when the lab cleaner accidentally thumped the test machine with a floor polisher once every 3 months.

We once had an enthusiastic "financial engineering" project manager who proposed using 10 test machines at once to do a 10,000 hour test in 1,000 hours. We told him if he could figure out a way to make a baby in 1 month using 9 women, we would try the same idea...